Sickening
by redwallanderson
Summary: The hyperflu sweeps the world.
1. Chapter 1

_**Prologue**_

The man laid on the stained tile floor of the hospital lobby, wrapped in a dirty blanket but still shivering like a leaf because it was dead cold in the lobby, even with the seventy or eighty people laying about everywhere pitifully. The man already had a terrific headache, and the lights and noise and moaning and groaning and dying gurgles of eighty plus people all around him were not helping at all. They were all slowly dying and completely vulnerable lying there on the floor as they grappled desperately in the throes of life and death.

"This is not how it's supposed to be," the dying man whispered. "It's all fucked up. I fucked it up. This is bad shit . . . " He knew that the Men With the Guns were going to be there very soon to finish him off, and finish off all the dying people laying everywhere in the dirty lobby, sprawled in their own excretment and blood and vomit. It was a horrible and pathetic scene, and the man knew it was going to get much worse. He took a short, sharp breath, and then . . .

"THOSE BASTARDS!" The man had somehow forced himself to his feet, even though he was trembling violently and he was pale as a ghost and looked like he had a massive case of the flu on a major scale. He held onto a nearby gurney to try to steady himself. "I welcome death! Let them come and take us!" He heard thumping bootsteps and turned weakly to see two dozen sharply uniformed soldiers marching through the doors into the hellish scene in the lobby, their rifles held at the ready, eyes facing grimly and emotionlessly forward. "DAMN EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU BASTARDS! TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT!! GREEEEEN MACHIIIINE, BOOOYS! How about you, Mr. Lieutenant Dickwad? Yeah, you! You _fuck_! You twisted _fag_!"

The military officer stared at him apathetically, and then at the terrified crowd of the dying. He simply nodded, and his men opened fire, shooting left to right methodically. There was no bulletproof cover in the entire lobby. The sick people screamed in fright as they tried to scramble out of the way. The man who had tried to give the speech fell over onto his back, grabbing at the side of his chest and looking at the blood seeping between his fingers. Oddly enough, he was smiling even while he was gasping for air. He stared up at the lieutenant as the officer slowly stepped over bodies and came towards him holding a pistol.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" the man croaked, his voice hoarse with the massive pain of the gunshot wound. The lieutenant didn't even answer or slow down. As he walked by, he aimed the pistol casually at the man's forehead and squeezed the trigger. The man's life flashed before his eyes the instant before the pistol thundered.


	2. And So It Begins

_**Chapter One**_

Theodore Braslin groaned as he awoke on the rumpled covers of the bed he usually shared with his live-in girlfriend Claire and their cat, Leenx. He groaned because he completely dreaded the usual day that awaited him. Repeated talks of marriage from Claire as they ate breakfast before Theodore went to work. Bitch-out sessions from Theodore's boss at the pizza place he worked at. Getting hit on by the old homeless lady who lived under the Eighteenth Street Bridge . . . He could just tell this was going to be a bad day; it was meant to be somehow. Nonetheless, he let his eye peek open and found Claire laying beside him fully clothed and staring at him.

"What are you doing?" he asked, obviously surprised. He sat up and yawned, stretching. Claire didn't say anything and he blinked. She was usually pretty talkative and joked and laughed a lot early in the morning. "Speak up," he insisted. He was worried that she had bad news.

"You really want to know?" she asked, and lay back on the bed, groaning because she was just as tired as he was at that moment. She worked a full-time job as a supervisor at a plant. "There's a lot of stuff going on . . . A lot . . . " She turned that intense gaze of hers on Theodore. "I can't do this anymore, Teddy."

He sat bolt upright, face as shocked as a man can be shocked. "Wh... Why?" he asked, nearly whispering. A single tear rolled down his cheek. He tried to stop it, but failed utterly.

She took a deep breath, looking away and refusing to meet his eyes now. "There are no answers."

They sat and listened quietly to the steady drizzle hitting the roof overhead. Theodore's heart pounded wildly, and all he could keep thinking was _Ho-ly shit_. He felt like crying for his mother. They were both silent for a moment.

"I don't make you happy?" Theodore's question wasn't really a question, it was a plea. A plea for Claire not to do what she was doing.

Claire sighed, and rubbed under her eyes. She was obviously trying not to cry. "Get a grip, Teddy. You're an arrogant asshole who doesn't make a lot of money and who is simply horrible in bed. Soooo . . . " She shrugged lamely. "Aren't you glad you asked now?" she said sarcastically, and finally met his eyes. There was no regrets in Claire's eyes. Only a certain cold satisfaction.

"Lucky me," he replied in a kind of hoarse whisper. "I . . . " He coughed. "I was crazy about you . . . " He felt breathless and devastated by this mental and emotional blow. "I thought it was true love . . . "

Claire laughed harshly. "We were childhood friends. I thought you were gay until you finally felt me up when we went to see that movie when we were in tenth grade. You're a worthless piece of shit. I actually managed to fuck your boss five times right under your nose, and now me and him are getting married." She laughed again.

For the first time that morning, Theodore felt fully awake. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs his broken heart had caused and was about to say something back to Claire when a knock came at the window and Jerry, Theodore's boss, was peering inside with a smile on his face and Claire winked. Jerry opened the window. "Have you told him?" he yelled. Theodore climbed off the narrow bed and at full stride crossed the room and looked Jerry right in the face.

"I've got the finest piece of ass in the town now," Jerry said, right to Theodore's face, a satisfied smile on his face. "Oh and uhhh . . . " His grin widened. "You're FIRED."

Theodore smiled gently and then for the first time in his life, he swung his fist into someone's face in anger and Jerry dropped like a stone and sprawled in the weeds outside the window, blood spraying from his nose. Theodore grinned mirthlessly and turned to a shocked Claire.

"Absolutely fucking magnificent," was his only comment.

--

Claire was squawking as Theodore set all her stuff outside. "You are fucking kidding me," she squealed. "This is my house, too. We got it together."

Theodore looked her straight in the face. "Guess who signed the papers, bitch? Guess who paid the bills with HIS work money while you spent YOUR work money on shoes and condoms to fuck my FUCKIN' BOSS with?" He looked towards the grass under their bedroom window where Jerry still laid unsonscious. "Uhhh . . . Yeah, you should probably get him to a hospital or something... Eh, who cares?"

"Please, please stop," Claire begged. "Take me back, take me back . . . " She hung onto his arm, pleading with him helplessly as he tossed her television off the porch with a satisfying smash.

Theodore laughed at her. "Go suck a dick. That's your ideal career, isn't it?" He slammed the door shut.

He spent the rest of the day jumping around the house and cheering wildly. Even though he had no job and no girlfriend any longer, he was free. Free of the lies and bullshit. Free of that dumbass Jerry and his idiotic pizza parlor. Theodore was fucking free. He consumed what amounted to at least a bucket of beer and passed out drunk in an armchair in his living room before it was even afternoon.

--

He was awakened late at night by a pounding on the door and moaned, kicking at the air to try to make it stop, whatever was making the noise to make his head feel like it was getting hit by an ax over and over. Then he heard it.

"Please . . . open . . . the door, Ted."

Theodore stumbled to his feet and staggered drunkenly away from the armchair. "Why?" he yelled at the locked door, slurring badly. "You want the rest of the money, you cash-grubbing slut? Go straight to hell. Don't you dare hang around my door all night asking for money, bitch."

The voice came again. Claire's voice, barely penetrating Theodore's drunken brain.

"After you locked me out, Jerry left me here and went to the hospital. He came back to get me but he was all wierd and sick and he fell in the yard. I looked around and noticed there was a bunch of dead guys laying everywhere in a lot of the yards and stuff . . . Then I started getting really sick really . . . " She coughed and spat something. "Fast. And I think . . . I'm dying, Teddy."

Theodore thought about it. Then he laughed loud enough where he was sure Claire could hear him outside, and he went back to sleep with her pleading cries like music to his ears.

It was a really quiet morning when Theodore woke up and went to the kitchen to drink from the nearly empty pot of coffee there. He was a little groggy, to say the least, and he had a massive headache. He suddenly realized that Claire had truly left him for Jerry and he began to cry. He had been crying for only a few minutes when he remembered last night and let out a harsh bray of laughter. He went to the front door, still holding the pot of coffee, and opened it, talking already before he even came out.

"Claire if you're still out here sleeping on my porch, I can't be held response for what I might d..." He trailed off as he saw Claire lying facedown in a pool of her own vomit, about ten feet off of the porch. Automatically, Theodore dropped the coffee pot with a smash on the porch and brought out his cellphone from the pocket of his stained pajama pants and dialed up the number for 911 and told them to bring the ambulance and the paramedics.

The operator sneezed thickly and then managed somehow to stop sneezing and laughed loudly. "You need some help and you want us to send an ambulance?" He laughed again, this time a little more hysterically. "Most of us here can barely even breathe, let alone drive or help your poor fuckin' friend!" He kept laughing and choking on the phone until Theodore finally hung up. He knelt by Claire's motionless form and lied to it, saying that the ambulance people were going to be here as fast as they could. He turned her over and saw that she was already dead. He made an odd sound and then sat down hard flat on his ass and softly moaned in grief and horror. He just couldn't bring himself to believe that the love of his life was lying dead in front of him. Maybe she had just fallen asleep . . . Maybe, maybe . . .

There was an explosive gasp a few feet away and Theodore blinked and leaped to his feet, whirling around to see Jerry laying nearby, and realized that what he had first thought to be a gasp was Jerry's wheezing laughter. "Some strange shit is going on . . . This shit . . . I can't even crawl to my fucking car, man . . . It's like fifteen feet away, and I've been laying here all morning trying . . . " He coughed and spat blood weakly. "Trying to get to it . . . And now I'm totally exhausted . . "

Theodore knelt beside the man he hated most. "Just relax, man," he cautioned, his voice shaking unsteadily. He checked his former boss out and swallowed hard, stepping back. On closer inspection, it seemed that something very wrong was happening right now. Something more than making people blow chunks (vomit) or cough. This was bad "Aw, shit . . . "

Jerry began his wheezing laughter again. There was blood crusted around his nostrils now, and his breathing was getting more and more erratic. "You . . . " He kept laughing breathlessly. "I'm contagious, and you touched me. Hahaha . . . " He spit a big wad of bloody mucus and grinned at Theodore, revealing teeth covered with the stuff.

Without another word, Theodore turned and ran off down the sidewalk and didn't look back, leaping over the bodies that were sprawled every which way, with Jerry's laughter ringing in his ears the whole way. He didn't know what was going on, but he knew that it was something big. He hated Jerry and hated what the delirious man had told him, but at the same time, he knew he was right. He knew Jerry was contagious with whatever was causing all of this. And Jerry had just laughed at him and went back to dying.

Theodore ran down the street screaming at the top of his lungs, letting the heavens hear his anger and frustration and grief and horror. He didn't even care that he was dressed simply in his pajama pants, naked from the waist up. He fell to his knees, tears still pouring down his face. And then he sneezed, and his eyes snapped wide open as he felt the pain starting to burn through his airways.


	3. Chapter 3

_**Chapter Two**_

Theodore went running right past the corner store, leaping over the vomit-stained body of a dead cop laying on the sidewalk there. By then, he was coughing up and spitting blood already and stumbling drunkenly, leaving a deadly red trail on the pavement behind him. He knew without a doubt that he was fucked. He was going to die a horrible death of choking on his own vomit or some shit or die of the immensely high fever that he had felt on Jerry's forehead. He wiped at his running nose with trembling fingers and stopped in the middle of the street. There was a pickup truck crashed into a parking meter a few feet away and a few abandoned cars with their engines still running and bodies lying a few feet from their open doors, but that was all. The street was deserted. The city was deserted. The country was deserted. For all Theodore knew, the world was deserted. He climbed into one of the still-running cars. He knew he had to drive to the local hospital and get some help.

Theodore laughed, sneezed and then put the vehicle in gear and started to pull out. Before he could get more than three feet, however, he spotted somebody walking down the street a few feet away. It was a young man, maybe nineteen or so. His eye was swollen shut and bloody snot was oozing from his nostrils without restraint. Theodore didn't look for long though. He stepped gently on the gas pedal and kept on driving past the stumbling young man. At least, until that young man beat on the passenger-side window with his fist to get Theodore's attention. When Theodore stopped the car and looked over, the guy aimed a pistol through the closed window at him.

"Open the door, you moron!" the young man yelled, spitting mucus angrily. "You're taking me to the hospital, or you're gonna get a bullet in the head and I'll drive there myself. You choose!" Without a word, Theodore opened the door for the gunman and the guy climbed into the passenger seat and gestured with the gun for Theodore to start driving towards the hospital, and he obeyed.

The young man sneezed, staring at Theodore suspiciously and keeping his pistol out. "Everything's fucked, man," he said thickly through the snot. "Here I was, just out to make a pizza delivery, and I ring the doorbell of some fuckin' house and some fat lady comes out and coughs what for all I know was malaria right into my fuckin' face, dude . . . I clocked the porker and she fell and I just ran, but my car was gone. Somebody had stolen my car in the time it took to knock that fat lady down." He shook his head in grudging admiration for the skill of that unknown thief. "I decided to roll with it, and I went back in there. The fat lady was out cold, laying in the doorway and there was some other dead folks inside the house." He shuddered and sneezed, harder this time. "One was a kid. Either way, I grabbed this gun where it was laying on a table, ran outside, and I've been walking or running for quite a while until I found _your_ lucky ass driving past, the only remotely healthy person I have seen since that lady coughed right in my face, man." He tucked his pistol away. "I don't think I'll need that. I think we both wanna get to the hospital anyways..."

"As long as we don't run out of gas," Theodore said quietly, keeping his eyes on the road but with a faint smile showing through the dried mucus crusted on his own lips. He coughed briefly and then his eyes flickered toward the gunman for just a moment. "My name's Theodore." He slowed the vehicle to a crawl so they could go around past a U-Haul truck that had rammed into a fire hydrant.

The young man coughed loudly before answering. "I'm Mickey." He looked like he was getting worse by the second, gasping for breath as if his airways were clogging up with something. "Hurry up," he growled, hauling the pistol back out and aiming it at Theodore's cheek. "We gotta hurry, man. Maybe this is something they can fix at the hospital."

"Everybody's dead," Theodore replied, still in a quiet, eerily calm tone. "And we're probably next. I've got a feeling that it won't be long now."

Mickey suddenly vomited -- yes, _vomited_ -- a flood of blood onto the dashboard and sat there with his head down, crying, for a moment. He aimed the pistol at Theodore once more. "Shut up or I'll shut you up. The hospital's three streets away. You better put that pedal to the metal or I'll blow your fucking head off."

"There's no need for that," Theodore responded. "You're bleeding all over the place. Hand me your gun and maybe I might hurry. But I'm not going to drive that fast with you aiming a gun at my face."

Mickey snorted like an angry bull and handed the gun over. Theodore placed it on the seat beside him and then put the pedal to the metal, just like Mickey had told him to.

--

When Mickey and Theodore entered Stateside Hospital, they saw that it was already flooded with dead and dying people. The lobby was filled up with cots, which meant the upper floors and pretty much every other room was full as well. Theodore looked around for doctors or nurses or anything, but he was shocked to see that half of the 'patients' were the doctors themselves, sick from whatever they had tried to help people to get rid of. Everyone was dying and waiting for help that would not come. And no one _could_ help..

Theodore turned to exit the hospital but a hand grabbed the back of his shirt with a sort of a death grip and wouldn't let go. He turned and saw a woman in a waitress uniform holding onto his shirt for dear life. Mucus was practically squirting from her nose and trickles of blood were coming out of the corners of her eyes and her ears.

"Help, help, please somebody," she shrieked hoarsely, spraying snot and bloody mucus all over, mostly into Theodore's face and Mickey's shirt. She was so close to Theodore that their lips nearly touched and he could see the dying desperation in her haunted eyes. He gave her a hard shove in the chest and she toppled back onto a cot, and she and the person that had been occupying that cot both toppled over bonelessly and didn't get back up. Theodore suspected that they didn't have the _strength_ to get back up, anymore.

"Now, we are fucked," Mickey said in a very low voice. Theodore turned to look at his young companion and saw that the other man had brought the gun with him from the car and was silently cocking back the slide. "This is bullshit. Now, we are fucked," he said again before putting the gun barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger. His brains exploded out the back of his head and Mickey fell back against the wall and slid down it, painting it red and gray with the blood and brain matter which had been blown outwards.

Theodore stared blankly at the dead young man. "This is fucked up," he whispered, agreeing with Mickey's last words. He hesitated a moment and then forcefully pried the pistol from Mickey's cold, dead fingers. He turned around and fired twice into the ceiling of the hospital lobby, getting everyone's undivided attention. Everyone even stopped coughing and vomiting for a moment.

"Listen up!" Theodore yelled as loud as he could manage with his snot-filled throat. "They are gonna find a fucking vaccine for this or some shit, maybe even in a coupla days. But we won't last that long unless we take care of each other. Do you fuckin' understand?" He turned to the healthiest-looking doctor he could see and knelt by the man's cot. "Dude, come on. They need treatment. Is there anything that can help them? Anything at all?"

"You can try antibiotics," the doctor coughed. "Third floor, supply room. Go. Hurry."

Theodore turned and he hurried away.


End file.
